My development workstation is getting a little old, it still has a 3.6Ghz i7 and 32Gb of RAM along with a fancy graphics card that drives 3 monitors but occasionally it feels like its being asked to do too much.
Comparing things like the boot speed or heaven forbid the Windows upgrade speed to my Surface Book it sometimes feels like my old Sinclair Spectrum (for those of you not old enough to remember this was a home computer with 16k of memory and a 3.5Mhz processor that loaded everything from cassette tapes, and well if you don’t remember those then just skip over this part).
It is time to give it a little tweak by adding one or more SSDs, perhaps a dedicated one for the Windows swap file and another as a boot drive. I know one of them would be a SATA drive, but for neatness I considered making the boot drive a PCIe drive that would plug directly into the motherboard and take up a slot. The problem is I am a pretty chaotic person and I know I put the motherboard manual safe, I just can’t remember where so I needed another way before I ordered something that would then requirement to order an interface card.
I could have just taken the cover of the PC but I always think that every time you do that you are tempting fate that something will fail so I looked for another way. It turns out it was easier than I thought.
It was time to delve into the Windows Management Instrumentation system using the wmic utility.
Opening a CMD window all I had to do was type
wmic baseboard get product,manufacturer,version,serialnumberAnd the wmic command line utility returned
Manufacturer Product SerialNumber Version
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z87-HD3 To be filled by O.E.M. x.xYou may have noticed that when I called wmic I specified version, then serial number but the command returned it in the order serial number and then version. I don’t know why that happens.
So there we have a simple way to discover what is lurking under the hood of your computer, but the bad news is it doesn’t appear that the Z87-HD3 motherboard in the machine supports PCIe, so it looks like two SATA SSD drives.